Every part of the story the Indonesian Army told is a lie. No Gerwani women participated in any killings on October 1.65 More than three decades later, Benedict Anderson was able to prove not only that the account of the torture of the generals was false, but that Suharto knew it was all false in early October. He himself ordered an autopsy that showed all the men were shot except one, who may have been stabbed with a bayonet in a fight at his home.66 But by 1987, when Anderson’s proof was published, not much of that discovery mattered anymore. The story of a demonic communist plot to take
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